Maybe the internet is alive already?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the internet since about 1977, when I first realised what computers could do and that they could talk to each other. I used to tell people that one day that we would all have computers and that they would be connected by the phone and that one day the final connection would be made that would turn the mass of computers into one brain.

Of course everyone said I was mad! Many people, technologists mostly, believe that this is likely in some way.

Thinking about the idea of the Web, this morning, I wonder if it hasn’t come alive already. I always assumed it would be a thinking, reasoning brain. What if it is just plain stupid or just not very intelligent?

Like a spider… sitting in the middle of a web, catching anything it can, sucking the juice out and doing nothing other than surviving to do the same the next day.

Isn’t that what the web is doing – sucking the juice out of what it is that makes us humans? Anything original that is posted on the web is immediately homogenised, made to fit into standards, broken up into bits, re-mashed, churned up and made to look like something new, which it isn’t. We come to expect standards.

A couple of years ago it was fashionable to talk about nano technology leading us into a world of grey goo. Well, isn’t that where we are heading on the internet? A world of grey digital goo, where everything is so chopped up and interlinked that it becomes meaningless.

A couple of days ago I posted an article about eBooks and authors. This was then posted up on a meaningless site called astonmartinnews.com. This site seems to have no reason to exist, other than to post links to other sites in the hope you will be drawn to it and then click on the advertising.

The page says that my blog entry has been tweeted about three times from that page! There are three comments on the article each linking to adverts to sell you ebooks. The whole confection has been whipped up by computers and there has not been one human interchange in the whole affair. What the hell is it about? All that Human ingenuity put to work for absolutely nothing. And this is going on all over the web every single microsecond. As more and more spurious links are made by mindless machines, the whole net becomes a mess, the real stuff gets harder to find so we fall back on the homogenised wisdom of Wikipedia, a wonderful encyclopaedia of pop culture.

When did you last get a really useful result from Google on the front page? The rest of the net is obsessed with SEO, search engine optimisation, which basically means that you have to lie about the quality of your content to get to the front page so you can sell some ads. Real content is to be found on page 1245.

The net is a dead-eyed, care-less living monster that is slowly consuming our culture. Next it will begin sucking out the essence of our humanity.

The internet is probably the greatest tool we have ever invented – it may also be the worst.

British Library Web Archive

Hey, I’m in the British Library Web Archive! that must mean something, if only points, but then, what do points mean?

It’s made me think about the various stages my site has been through. Maybe I should put up my own archives up on my site. I think I still have my old HTML site from the 1990s lying around on a disk somewhere.

You are not a gadget – Jaron Lanier – part 2

I’ve finished reading Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget,.

The positive ideas he said would be at the end of the book never really arrived. He has to split his mind in two to be able to start questioning, never mind get answers. He views art and humanity from a humanist viewpoint and technology from a computationalist viewpoint. The two views never meet as, I suspect, Newtonian Physics and Quantum Physics will never meet. Lanier has a vision of the future where we all become octopi on lsd.

It doesn’t excite me, I’m afraid. It’s hard enough being who you are, let alone pretending to be someone else in an online environment. He’s done a lot of work in Virtual Reality. He says that the brain soon responds to a new body and learns how to operate extra legs and make up for physical limitations.

I’m sure the brain would happily exist in cyberspace if it could, but what would that do to the concept of Humanity. The one thing that Lanier holds onto is the idea that Humans are special. We are not computers. We are something higher than that.

I can’t help but feel that the internet is changing that – smoothing down the individual, banging square pegs into round holes, making everything blend into gloop so that online culture becomes no greater than the giant, stupid, soap opera of Facebook or YouTube.

I’m beginning to think that the internet is a disease that has infected us. Did you see Avatar? That scene where the tree sends fungal-like filaments over the bodies as it scoops up the life force? I think that is what the internet is doing to us. Every time we connect another root is sunk into our brains, making it harder and harder to disconnect.

What would happen if you went offline? Can you? Your phone is now the internet. There are things you cannot do offline. How would you check train times, plot routes, find stuff out? Libraries are getting rid of non-fiction, because no one uses it anymore.

If I disconnected would the world stop around me? How hard would it be? Would I be happier? Would I ever work again? How could I let everyone know how brilliant it was if I couldn’t blog about it?

We are so hooked and hooked-up we can’t stop. It’s worse than an addictive drug, there is no cold turkey other than becoming a monk in an isolated Tibetan monastery. It’s all around us in the airwaves. We cannot escape.

But we might, one day be disconnected – and then where would we be?

I am not a gadget, but I am beginning to feel like one. Someone or something is pulling the strings, making me write this load of nonsense. I could have gone out and done something useful instead – made a cup of coffee, fixed one of the many things in the house I’ve been ignoring for too long, but no – something is calling – needing text entry. I don’t think it is me feeling I have to do it – I have no idea who my reader is. I really do feel that I’m providing data for something bigger than me. Perhaps I should just be happy with that thought, but I’m not sure if that bigger thing is good or bad and whether I want to be associated with it.

I’m a children’s author, for goodness sake, I should be exploiting this blog to make people want to buy more of my books. Instead I’m making them think, “he’s a weirdo!” let’s buy someone else’s books instead, someone who knows how to play the game and appear soft and cuddly and non-threatning.

Perhaps the internet is not there to be questioned and thought about. Perhaps it really is just a communications device to be exploited for our own ends. Just an enormous advertising billboard onto which we can spray our bits of graffiti or slap up our posters saying, “Buy me now!” Then we can take the money and run off to a beautiful desert island and end our days in the sunshine.

Google – Angel or Devil?

Google claim to be “the Good Guys”. Maybe they are – at the moment. When that amount of power is focussed in one place, you can bet your bottom dollar the bad guys will want a piece, if not all of the action.

At the moment, Google makes so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it. So what it does, is create new little bits to further colonise the web and other communication technologies, so that in a couple of years, when a some nerds from Stanford come up with a “Google Killer” idea, the web will be owned by Google and they won’t get a look in. Google has learned not to let itself fall into the same trap Microsoft did.

If Google were making real things or selling food or any other utility, they would have been broken up into pieces by now, but somehow, we are perfectly happy to blindly let a real Big Brother outfit take over our lives, because they keep telling us they are the “Good Guys”.

If they really are the good guys, then they should stop fiddling about with operating systems and phones and apply their considerable power and inventiveness to the problem of content.

Google is a parasite. It makes its money by exploiting people like me – the creatives, who spend our lives having ideas, using our brains to move the human condition on. Google sucks up what we do, mashes it up and sells advertising on the back of it. It pays us nothing for our work and claims all the profit. That is either theft or slavery. The very word content demeans the work of creative people. The Mona Lisa is content to a web technologist. Picasso and Shakespeare mere content providers. Content is just a nebulous medium that can be focussed by aggregating technologies to sell advertising to finely chosen markets.

I’m beginning to feel a bit jaded about the wonder of the web. No one makes money as a creative person on the web. Certainly not enough to live on. It makes communication faster and easier, but is that a good thing? When I was young, you could send a postcard in the morning and it would be delivered by tea. Isn’t that really enough? we used to pick up the phone and actually talk to people at the other end – wasn’t that better?

I find myself glued to my communication devices these days. The day goes by and I’ve done nothing but blog, sort through spam and obsessively check my youtube and website stats, this because my publishers tell me it’s not enough to have ideas, to write and illustrate and visit schools and libraries and perform at festivals anymore, I have to blog to create and maintain my market. Woah! Isn’t that the publisher’s job? I blog away like mad, but I don’t think it makes a blind bit of difference to my market, because I don’t address my blog to my market. If I did, there wouldn’t be any point in writing the books, as I’d be giving all my creative work away to the kids who aren’t the ones who buy the books anyway.

Meanwhile, as you read this blog, you and I are putting a journalist out of business, because you really should be reading carefully considered, well-written work from a paid-for journal and I should not be dashing this off for free, but submitting it to a journal who would pay me for my time and effort.

If Google really are the good guys, they should put all their energy into one project – online micropayments.

I’ve removed creative projects from the web because I did not get paid for them while they were online. As they were free, they took away from sales of real books from which I earn real money. Now I can’t be bothered to work on all the great ideas I have because I can’t afford to do them, because I know I won’t get paid.

If I got a micropayment every time someone looked at one of my projects, then it would become worthwhile to start putting projects together, or it would be worthwhile for publishers to gravitate towards online delivery. The way things are going, in about five years time, there is going to be a blood bath in publishing unless an equitable way is found to pay people for the work they do online. As far as I’m concerned, my good will and the fun of experimentation has worn out. Like everyone else, I need to eat and in this system, that means I need cash, not the promise of a new paradigm in a generation’s time, when I’ll be 90 and having to stack shelves at the supermarket.

I tried setting up a secure area of my site to provide quality content. But I could not guarantee the security of it and I found myself turning into a systems administrator – I shouldn’t have to do that. The business guys will tell me that I should be entrepreneurial and set up my own content delivery business, but then I’d never be creative again – I’d spend all my time employing others to do the creative work, while I did the paperwork and programming. I have a publisher to do that. It’s a weird twisted re-cycling argument that technologists and web business people don’t seem to get.

Since the web began to take hold, my workload has at least doubled. If only my income had done the same. I may have stayed in the same place – I think I’m probably going backwards in real terms.

The internet is turning into a place that is purely commercial, a system for screwing money and free labour out of the plebs, (that’s us) by legal or illegal means. Will we continue to walk blindly down this path, or will we revolt or will the good guys come to our aid and create a future that we might want to be part of?

Online video in schools

My Drawing school is beginning to be quite successful, but it is noticeable that most of my hits come from California, the home of all things digital – a really wired society.

The trouble with UK viewings is that schools seem to disallow YouTube point blank, which is a terrible shame as there are amazing things on there. I’ve been trying to upload lessons to TeacherTube, but it is a horrible site to deal with. They don’t allow widescreen and it takes me at least ten attempts to upload a video. Once they are up, I seem to get good viewing figures, but I’m so frustrated with it.
Can you help me? below is a test video from wordpress, who host my site. It’s a great service, but pointless if it can’t be seen behind firewalls. I know some education authorities ban anything from wordpress.com too. Crazy!
Can you see this video on your school network? I’d really like to know. Do you have a special teacher login that lets you see sites the the kids can’t see? Can you have this site approved for viewing videos?

Snow: It’s Back

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It would be so useful to know. please make comments below. You can do this without having to give your email address.

eBooks and authors

There is a big problem with ebooks. Once all the books in the world have been digitised, there will only be one book. No author, no revenue, except for those who find ways to exploit the power of cut and paste. There will be no reason to write a book again.

Books take time and consideration. Those doing the work need recompense – even if it is only praise and acclaim. There is nothing for the ego in the mashup world of the big ebook.

Look what has happened to music. Because it is so ubiquitous, recorded music has little value anymore. At least musicians have the option of going on tour and making money from live audiences.

You could argue that that is how authors get paid already. Very few make any money from selling books. They live by talking and teaching others how to write books, thus putting themselves further out of business. Technology has not only made books freely available on Amazon, it has both pushed the price down and allowed myriads of middle men to come in and chip away at the profit, making it less and less viable to be an author.

Already we have mash up books written by anonymous committees in anonymous “creative” production houses, promoted with marketing budgets that individual authors would never get spent on their books. This is marketing, not authorship. It’ll be a sad day when that is all that is available – fodder for stupid humans that will have allowed it to happen to them – Soma.

I guess there are a few authors who manage a life on the road, with large audiences all buying signed copies of the book as a souvenir of the gig to put in their collections- not as a book to be read. This is what musicians do now, but an author needs down time for contemplation. If that is taken out of the equation, then all that is produced is pulp. More pulp for the big mashup book in the clouds.

Of course I should declare self-interest in this problem. Will I be able to make any money from my chosen career in a few years time. Something tells me I won’t and that I’d better start looking for new revenue streams.

When I was young, you needed to be a god to even think about starting a band. I had a high opinion of myself! But it was hard to do. There were no mentors, we had to work it out ourselves. Now you can get kitted out at Lidl, learn from the best teachers on youtube and make yourself sound perfect with recording software. The result? Modern music all sounds the same, all overproduced and lacking soul. No wonder all the kids are happily listening to music of my generation. We would have poked our eyes out rather than listen to Doris Day! Music is over. It’s just there and anyone can do it. I don’t see anyone doing anything interesting lyrically these days. Lyrics are a nuisance – they require thought and practice and hard work. Much better to toss off a few lines of greeting card pulp.

Authorship by its very nature, requires time spent thinking, formulating ideas and arguments. It takes a human brain to do this. Machines can churn out stuff that looks like text (humans can do this too!), but you wouldn’t want to read it. The net has to find a way for the individual to be allowed to make money from their ideas and their humanity otherwise the machines win by default, without ever becoming intelligent themselves.

You are not a gadget – Jaron Lanier

I’m reading Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget, at the moment.

Lanier is one of the original geeky gurus of the net. He’s taking stock and having a think about where we are going in this book, which he calls a manifesto. I haven’t got to the manifesto part yet, but his musings are most thought provoking.

I got in on the net quite early, building my first website in early 1997. Most people thought I was silly, self-indulgent or plain wasting my time. everybody told mw I was crazy when I told them they would all be emailing and video conferencing, shopping and banking online. “You won’t catch me doing that!” they all told me.

They were exciting times. If you weren’t there, you’ll never understand. The net was growing in dog years, the speed of change was incredible, keeping up with it was like being on drugs. Every day was a bright, new dawn as new possibilities opened up. I think my family worried about me for a while! I never did make a million – not many did – but the intellectual pursuit was worth it in itself.

But now it’s been corporatised. Just like the record companies collared the music industry, Facebook, Google et al have collared the net for their own ends. Does it matter? Maybe not now. These are pretty good guys – at the moment. But for how long?

Everyday Google and Facebook colonise our lives, not just affecting our society, they are becoming our society. We think we are the customers of these giant corporations, but we are not. We are the product. The advertisers are the customers! It takes a moment to get your head around that one. We do a deal with Facebook and Google – Give us these amazing tools and we will give you gigabits of high-level information about us and our lives, so that you can sell to us stuff we never knew we needed.

Lanier argues that we are becoming conditioned by the providers. We are being turned into homogenised purchasing units – infinitely targetable by the advertisers. A good number of people now think Facebook is email – that is how they communicate.

Facebook is a boring, corporate, homogenised environment. It always looks the same and you are not in control. Remember last week how your front page changed? Did you have any say in that? Slowly, in tiny baby steps, they are grinding down their users so that they don’t notice innovations anymore and accept things into their lives that, if introduced in on fell swoop, would get them out on the streets protesting.

Facebook is there to make money for itself and for advertisers and for no other reason. The same with Google. They call themselves the good guys, but so did the Nazis. Google, in the hands of a dictator, could be the end of civilisation.

Lanier wants to celebrate humanity, and that is what we do not do in this brave new Web2.0. We homogenise and we anonymise. Yes, you can be who you like on the net, but what does that do to the real you? What does that do to real interaction between human beings. When you make a comment on the net and sign yourself, anonymous12547, what does that say about you? You are worthless and your comment is worthless, it may as well have been posted by a robot making up a stream of words that seem to make sense if read in the right order.

What happened to all those whacky personal websites? They all became corporatised. We are told what a website should look like and so they now all look the same.

I’m with Lanier, let’s bring a bit of humanity back to the web. It is a tool, not our god.

iPad

Being a long-time mac fan, starting off with an LCII, now with an Imac to work on, an iPhone to travel with and an iBook for on the sofa – yes, I have mobile me too – I’m slightly underwhelmed by the iPad.

Yes it’s beautiful, yes it does the job beautifully, It may be okay to read books on it, that depends on the screen. Apple has always bigged-up screen quality and I’ve never thought they were as good as they hyped them.

The ipad is a laptop replacement, but it doesn’t do what a laptop does.

You wouldn’t want to hike it around just to do what an ipod or iphone do already. It doesn’t take photos or video and it doesn’t run run mac applications. It only runs proprietry applications.

Steve Jobs shows us what a brilliant web browser it is by reading the New York Times. Of course he doesn’t mention that the page is littered with little lego blocks that tell us that iPad does not run Flash. I’d cope with that on a phone, but on a machine that is sold as the best web-browsing experience in the world? A web-browser without Flash – get real!

The only additional feature is the bookstore. I don’t think that is a killer app. I’m sure the hard-core fans will buy it, but I’m not sure who else will.

The entry price is good, but I’d rather have a proper computer that can do all the things I want it to. I’m sure the screen keyboard is much better than the iPhone’s, but I don’t want to write a manuscript on it.

Sorry Apple. I’m sure I’d like one to have a round, but I dons’ see the point of paying money for it.

CAPTOLOGY – Word Of The Day – build your word power

Woah! I came across this quite by accident. Captology is the study of the use of computer technology to change people’s attitudes or behaviours. Scary!

Find out more here.

Learn a new word every day.
Repeat it and remind yourself what it means at least three times in a day.
Try to use the word in conversation or writing today.
Get a dictionary and look words up.

Web Presence

I’ve finally managed to move all my domains over to a new ISP. I got so fed up with my old one. They kept slapping on extra fees for nonsense that you get free everywhere else.
It’s not easy – or rather they make it very difficult to move away from them. You really have to keep your wits about you.

Any way it’s all done. I visited Class 2 at Clearwell School this morning to talk to them about Ricky Rocket ready for their big Space theme. My website was up on the board, but not working. Having such a spidery site, it’s hard checking it all works, and no one has sent me link failure emails like they used to in the old days.

Once my site was special because it was the only one out there. No it is just another author site. If it doesn’t work there’ll be another somewhere. Makes you wonder if it is worth all the ridiculous amount of time and effort!